The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘opportunity’

Fresh off the heels of a distribution agreement that brought many of e-books in its catalog to Scribd, indie book publisher Author Solutions (ASI) has inked a similar deal with bookseller Barnes & Noble.

Under terms of the agreement, e-book formats of all new ASI titles published through the AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, and Xlibris imprints will be made available for purchase through the B&N website on its nook reader.

Much like the agreement with Scribd, a default price of $9.99 will be set for every title, but each author will have the opportunity to set his or her own price.

E-book distribution through bn.com and nook will be included as a free service for all new black-and-white ASI titles.

Independent book publisher Author Solutions today announced a distribution deal with social publishing startup Scribd. Under the terms of said agreement, all new ASI titles published through the AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, and Xlibris will be made available for purchase through the Scribd website.

In addition, a portion of its backlist of more than 120,000 titles will be put up for sale on Scribd, although there was no indication of exactly how many books that represents.

In March 2009, Scribd had already scored partnerships with a number of major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications. And all that content is attracting a lot of users too, apparently.

In a statement, Author Solutions says the Scribd portal currently attracts over 50 million users per month, and that the startup’s platform will help authors make more money from book sales because it brings higher royalty percentages than are possible with traditional paper-and-ink books. In its promotion video, which I embedded below, Author Solutions says it has helped some 85,000 authors get their books published to date.

Under terms of the agreement with Scribds, authors will receive 50 percent of the net sales of their titles through the startup’s social platform. A default price of $9.99 will be set for each title, but authors will have the opportunity to set their own prices.

Distribution to Scribd will be included as a free service for all new ASI titles.

We recently wrote about the death of Kublax, a Mint.com for the UK. Kublax, a Seedcamp 2007 winner which launched in August 2008, was unable to secure funding in an arena that was chock full of competitors, including MoneyDashboard, and Lovemoney.com.

But it looks like Kublax may have found a lifeline. In an email to the customers of its beta site, founders Sridhar Sethuraman and CEO Tom Symonds wrote that Kublax is in discussions with UK site Simply Finance to keep the personal finance sites alive. Here’s the text of the message:

We are very happy to report that we are currently in advanced discussions with a UK based consumer finance website, Simply Finance, to find a way to keep the Kublax site up and running.

As a result, our service will not shut down today as we had initially feared, and we will be working very closely with SimplyFinance to arrive at a long term solution which will allow us to keep the Kublax site and services available to you indefinitely.

We will give you a further update on Monday.

Simply Finance helps consumers to find the lowest rates available on mortgages, insurance, loans, debt solutions and a range of other financial products and services. It’s unclear if Simply Finance is in talks to acquire Kublax or just fund the startup.

Kublax launched it’s public service in May last year of “just under” 1 million euros. The new funds were from Ambient Sound Investments and individuals such as Stefan Glänzer, former executive chairman of Last.fm and Jonty Kelt, Vice President of Search, International with DoubleClick. Previous investors which participated in that round were The Accelerator Group (TAG) (a Seedcamp backer), Omnis Mundi Invest AG and Digitalents Capital. In February 2008 Kublax won a round of undisclosed angel investment from those latter three, together with Five Ventures.

I could sit here and talk about the latest big “ hack attack ” to strike the civilized world, but these have become so tedious. The story is always the same: hackers from scary place (here, China and Eastern Europe) attack Western government/corporation (here, corporations) for unknown, shadowy reasons.

Go here to read the rest: 
Oh look, another hack attack that could have been prevented

Clicker, a comprehensive search engine for TV content on the web, has closed an $11 million Series B funding round led by JAFCO Ventures, with existing investors Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures also participating. JAFCO’s Joe Horowitz will join the Clicker board. The new funding brings Clicker’s total funding to $19 million, after an $8 million round the company closed in October 2008.

Clicker doesn’t actually store content on its servers, but instead makes it very easy to search through the vast amounts of content available online. Clicker’s index includes over 600,000 full length TV episodes spanning 10,000 shows. The service also allows users to search through premium content including Netflix’s Instant Streaming movies and Amazon Video on Demand (though you have to pay to watch them). The site also offers music videos, and has started teaming up with schools to index their lectures and other original content (UCLA is the first school to try the system out).

CEO Jim Lanzone says that the new funding wasn’t a case of the company needing more money (he says they have plenty left in the bank), but that the company was seeing a lot of inbound interest from VCs and decided to take advantage of the opportunity.  The company now has 32 employees.

Clicker made its debut at last year’s TechCrunch50 conference, and opened to the public in November.

Last summer, we wrote about the launch of Retweet.com, a Tweetmeme knock-off with a killer name. Mesiab Labs, a company associated with some spammy Twitter projects like Hummingbird, launched it in August with some fanfare. However, since then, Tweetmeme has remained the king of the space. And now Mesiab Labs has put the killer domain up for auction.

As you can see on this Flippa page, the current bids for Retweet.com stand at $20,000. This is a huge increase from yesterday when the bids hovered around $10. So far, there are 27 bids. The listing on the site claims the domain gets 12 million uniques a month, and 26 million pageviews. If that’s the case, you have to wonder, why sell?

Well part of the reason has to be that Twitter itself is trying to trademark the word “retweet.” Mesiab Labs was also apparently tried to trademark the name, though it’s not clear if that failed or if they are simply moving to sell before that happens. Twitter also tried unsuccessfully to trademark “tweet” last year.

We also asked Mesiab Labs about the auction. Here’s what they had to say:

When we initially conceptualized Retweet.com, we realized the importance of the new shift that social media sites like Twitter are making on how we filter and consume news.  We developed and fostered Retweet.com and its resulting network to help explore this concept. It has been quite exciting to see stories break before some of the major news media outlets and to watch blogs gain near mainstream status.  It’s also exciting to watch the pulse of the social world shift and sway.  But more than novelty, we are demonstrating incredible new ways to apply crowd-sourcing to answer the question ”What matters, right now.”

There are some truly remarkable things about the term ReTweet. First, as we all know it was created by the users of Twitter – NOT by the Twitter itself. Second, like “Googling” something has become synonymous with using a search engine, “Retweet’ing” has become synonymous with the act of spreading online content virally.

While we aren’t the only ones in this space, we feel privileged to participate.

Now that we’ve grown and scaled the Retweet network and infrastructure, we’re ready to pass it on to someone who can truly push it to the next level. We’re excited about the opportunity for a new passionate owner to foster and grow Retweet.com and continue to tap the potential of what is undeniably becoming a monumental shift in news consumption.

They go on to note that if they don’t find a suitable buyer in 30 days, they’ll continue to operate the site themselves. It is a pretty killer domain, but is it worth the risk if Twitter gets the trademark?

When the HTC Hero was announced in June of last year , I would have made a valiant effort to eat my own head if it meant I got to own one. It was just so damned pretty . I just got the opportunity to play with its brand-new successor, the HTC Legend - and, well.

Read more: 
Hands-on with the HTC Legend (with video)

Good thing we didn’t go to MacWorld this year.

View original post here: 
Remember MacWorld? Here’s Cali Lewis’ look back

Oh snap, my main man! I’ve been waiting on LED Laser Fingers for disco get down. Hot dog! Give me your dials, pretty lady. Let’s talk, why not?! Hot for party! Okay you guys, for real

More here:
LED Laser Fingers! Finally!

We got a tip recently about a startup called BillFloat, which sports a rather limited website with nothing but a logo and a call for fresh engineers. The intriguing thing about BillFloat, however, was this sentence on the placeholder website: “We are a PayPal and Venrock backed startup re-defining a $100 billion market and are looking for Rails engineers.”

Since PayPal doesn’t have a particularly noteworthy track record of funding other companies, we asked the company about said investment, and got the following response:

PayPal did provide some seed money to billfloat, but we’re not disclosing any specifics. This is in line with what Naveed Anwar and Osama Bedier talked about at our developer conference in November … to encourage developers through guidance and resources to build innovative payment applications. Developers have the opportunity to secure support from PayPal and VC partners including seed funding, coaching, market insight and strategy. We also announced a developer challenge and a VC Network.

Digging a bit deeper, we found out that BillFloat was founded by two Entrepreneurs-In-Residence from VC firm Venrock (also called The Quarry team): serial entrepreneur Ryan Gilbert and former Yahoo exec Sean O’ Malley.

Gilbert, for one, knows his way around the digital payment market. He was co-founder and CEO of PropertyBridge, which was acquired by MoneyGram for $28 million in cash back in October 2007. He is also an advisor to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s latest startup, Square, which aims to revolutionize card payments on mobile phones.

I had a chat with Gilbert about BillFloat yesterday, in which I learned more about the company and its plans in the payment services space. Turns out BillFloat is not exactly meant to become a stand-alone company, product or service, but rather to function as an incubator for the development of multiple electronic payment ideas he, O’Malley and some people from PayPal have been chewing on for a while.

Here are some of things he said (paraphrased):

I’m excited by the opportunity to do something big in payments – to change the way consumers and businesses transaction. So at “BillFloat” we’re investigating new payment ideas, developing them, testing and softly launching in market in a couple of months. We are building our own products for launch under a brand that we will own; BillFloat is just a working name.

This all sounds rather vague, but Gilbert stressed that they have a clear road map ahead and that they aim to shake up the digital payments space, which he claims no one has done in a big way since the birth and rapid rise of PayPal over a decade ago. The basic idea behind BillFloat is to develop solutions that can payments easier for everyone, whether on the Web, mobile or interactive voice response platforms. We’re all for that.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

(Thanks to Judd Daniel for the tip)